1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to data processing, and more specifically to a method and apparatus for implementing applications requiring access to multiple files.
2. Related Art
Applications are often designed to access multiple files. For example, a merge application may retrieve a row of data from each of several input files and write the rows into an output file. Successive respective rows of the input files may be retrieved and written into the output file until all the rows of the input files are written. More complex operations may be performed while accessing multiple files, even though the description is provided substantially with respect to merge-type simple applications.
One problem with such applications is the corresponding software code is often written in unstructured manner (e.g., with file open/close statements and data read statements being placed in an ad-hoc fashion), making the software code (or underlying logic) difficult to understand. Such understandability may be important at least in situations when the application has to be debugged (or maintained, in general) or to re-use the code in other applications.